I follow her life with a manic swing from worry that she has died to news that, despite formidable odds against her, she is still alive on the craggy escarpment that is her home range. To single out an individual from the herd is a human, rather than a sheep, impulse, for everything about the life of wild sheep is group life. This ewe has no group. This ewe lives by herself on a wildlife refuge that was set aside over sixty years ago specifically to preserve bighorn sheep. Without her, the refuge would be preserving this many bighorn sheep: zero. She is the last remaining native desert bighorn in the Chihuahuan Desert. On the register at New Mexico's San Andres National Wildlife Refuge, she is San Andres Ewe 067, named for the order of her capture during a refuge operation. I have a photograph taken from a helicopter that found this one elusive animal in a sea of peaks. She hates helicopters and usually walks straight into a wind cave when one arrives. And there she stays. She would likely emerge only after the chopper ran out of fuel, dropped out of the sky, fossilized in the desert sun, the human race expired, and cockroaches took over the world.
